Episode #294: 

Olivia Brooks Allan, Chief Client Officer at Nteractive, explains why most companies misunderstand what client centricity actually means. She shares how psychological safety, preparation, accountability, and deep client understanding create stronger relationships and long-term business growth. The conversation explores how leaders can build cultures that prioritize trust, productivity, and continuous improvement. Olivia also reveals why preparation is one of the clearest forms of respect in business.

“We take it a step further and help our clients feel safe. We want our clients to feel that we’re protecting them and thinking ahead for them. If we say we’re going to do something, we do it, and if we miss the mark, we take absolute accountability.” – Olivia Brooks Allan

In this conversation, Olivia Brooks Allan shares how leaders can move beyond surface-level customer-experience initiatives to create truly client-centric organizations. She explains why emotional safety, accountability, preparation, and proactive leadership directly influence long-term growth. The discussion also explores how agencies and executive teams can strengthen trust, both internally and externally, through intentional leadership behaviors and operational discipline.

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[Transcript]

[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome, everyone to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Prospectus podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and we have a very special guest on today, Olivia Brooks Allan. And you’re the Chief Client Officer at Nteractive, and I’m going to have you explain a little bit more about the company and what you do.

[00:00:19] Steve MacDonald: But what we’re going to talk about today, I’m almost ready to record our 300th episode with C-suite executives, and we’ve never dug into client centricity the way that we are today. And we all know it’s important. We all know that we’re supposed to be customer-obsessed, customer-first, right? We would all say that.

[00:00:40] Steve MacDonald: But it’s actually how we show up, right? How do we put that into action, and how do we make client centricity really the driver, put it into the driver’s seat for our business? And, you know, I had the good fortune of interviewing a gentleman, the Chief Customer Officer at Ipsos, and they do tons of studies on this kind of stuff.

[00:00:59] Steve MacDonald: And he agreed on the podcast. He said, “If you optimize for the customer experience, you optimize for revenue, you optimize for growth.” That’s how important this is, and they have all kinds of studies and different ways that show it’s directly tied to revenue. So this is not only a C-suite conversation for us, but for CFOs, CROs, CEOs, CMOs, and anyone who wants to grow their business.

[00:01:24] Steve MacDonald: So I’m very excited about what we’re going to talk about here today. And I’d love to hear more about your background, because you came up in a very B2B, C-suite, five-star customer experience that really molded how you think. Actually, from a personal perspective, you’ve got five brothers and sisters, and how you were raised in the family and treated has a big impact on how you treat people in the organization, the role, the importance of people. So I’d love to just hear a little bit more about you and your background before we get started.

[00:02:00] Olivia Brooks Allan: Great. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I’m honored to be part of such an important and successful podcast, so congratulations to you, Steve. It’s been so fun to be, first of all, a listener, and now be sitting down and having this amazing conversation with you.

[00:02:17] Olivia Brooks Allan: And it’s wonderful to touch on your background. I’m a firm believer that where you came from really matters. And I’m sure we’ll touch on how important I believe character and integrity is, and how we think about our people, and how we hire, and our talent. But you touched on it, so I will gladly, you know, do a bit of a shout-out to the way that I was brought up.

[00:02:41] Olivia Brooks Allan: I grew up in Northern California, very proudly, sort of no shoes on, horses, chickens, dogs, cats, and, as you mentioned, five other brothers and sisters. And we really held each other accountable. In a time when there are a lot of screens and probably many children are over-scheduled, we had family dinners.

[00:03:01] Olivia Brooks Allan: Mm-hmm. We did a lot of hiking together. There was a lot of conversation, a lot of debate, and, as I said before, a lot of holding each other accountable, which I think has really informed who I became. I spent 10 years in the luxury hospitality industry, very, very proudly. I worked for incredible companies that were so ahead of their time, and continue to be, arguably, The Four Seasons and The Peninsula Hotels, in how they think about the customer.

[00:03:32] Olivia Brooks Allan: And to this day, I’m just so grateful for having duties early on in my career like the lobby lizard. So you’d be assigned to stand in the lobby at 6:00 in the morning till 8:00 in the morning and watch guests, you know, watch them walk into the hotel for the different events and activities, or watch guests go out to do their runs.

[00:03:53] Olivia Brooks Allan: And you watched how everyone, from our front desk to our concierges to the doorman, got to know and understand how they were anticipating the needs of our guests in every moment. And it taught me so much. I didn’t grow up with a background of privilege, so it certainly introduced me to the finer touches of life that can make things really interesting. And if accessible to you, it’s certainly something that those five-star hotel experiences provide.

[00:04:24] Olivia Brooks Allan: But most importantly, I learned how to see people differently and how to anticipate their needs, and that’s really translated into my passion. I was proud to be at American Express for many years, and it’s a very client-centric company. I was at Gartner for many years, and that was a client-centric company. So I am really proud that I was able to use that foundation and really learn and observe early on.

[00:04:48] Steve MacDonald: And tell us a little bit, because what’s amazing is those B2C environments, what you learned, and how you apply it in the world of B2B. Explain what you do at Nteractive and who Nteractive is. We have that context, too.

[00:05:03] Olivia Brooks Allan: So I proudly, and I pinch myself literally every morning, and I say to my family that I have the best job in the world. I’ve worked really hard. My career has not followed a straight line. I’m very proudly sort of a squiggly professional, where, as opportunities have been presented to me and huge challenges have come up, people have taken chances on me. And I am so grateful to all those leaders who made me offers to say, “Would you come and work for us and do X, Y, or Z?”

[00:05:36] Olivia Brooks Allan: And I had that opportunity presented to me 18 months ago to join Nteractive, which is a UK-based, brand marketing and event production agency that’s been around for 16 years. We were founded by two incredible people who put people and clients at the center of everything they’ve done to build the agency.

[00:06:00] Olivia Brooks Allan: I work for an incredible CEO, Ian Cummings. Fun fact, we started on the exact same day, because we have these really amazing, humble founders who said, “We’re going to move into board seats and bring on some new talent that can help us blend with our existing incredible talent and scale this agency into its next phase.”

[00:06:23] Olivia Brooks Allan: And so I’ve had the role of Chief Client Officer now for 18 months. I’ve traveled the globe. I’ve had a chance to work shoulder to shoulder with our people, which is the part I love most, and to sit in a lot of crew rooms and attend lots of client meetings. Some of them were, “Thank you so much for everything,” and some of them were, you know, “We need you to fix this and this.”

[00:06:44] Olivia Brooks Allan: And we’ve risen to that challenge, and we’ve done a lot of evolving as an agency. So, as an example, last week we had eight different incentive events going on across the globe, to put it in perspective, as well as a big user conference production. We’re proud of all the work we do as an agency.

[00:07:04] Steve MacDonald: So I have a founder background, an agency background, a consulting background, and I’ve worked inside of companies as a CMO. And what I really appreciate about the agency perspective and experience is that you get to touch, understand, and get inside many different organizations, right?

[00:07:22] Steve MacDonald: At the same time, though, you have to wear the same hat that they do in terms of growing your own B2B company, right? So you’ve got kind of perspectives from all different sides and your phenomenal five-star luxury experience. So I’m just going to start out by saying you talked about a pretty serious customer experience gap in the marketplace.

[00:07:45] Steve MacDonald: And I’d just love to start out and say, can you describe that gap so we can understand it? And then we’ll talk about how we address and get around that gap.

[00:07:55] Olivia Brooks Allan: Absolutely. So because I didn’t grow up through becoming a typical, in many event production and brand marketing agencies, you have a lot of people inside the agency that grew up doing production or doing technical production or having been a project lead.

[00:08:13] Olivia Brooks Allan: I didn’t have that background. My first role at American Express, for example, involved selling advisory services. I met with Chief Client Officers and Chief Revenue Officers to present opportunities to accelerate their businesses by focusing on cost savings and bringing in subject-matter experts from our company.

[00:08:37] Olivia Brooks Allan: And so I come from a background that isn’t traditional agency, so I want to be really clear about that as my agency colleagues are listening to this. I come with a different lens. But the lens is also, for me, very important, because, given my background, my role, and my passion, frankly, it’s always to really understand a client’s business.

[00:09:01] Olivia Brooks Allan: So when you hear me talk about being client-centric, I think it’s a word that is overused, and I think it’s a buzzword. It’s easy for you to say, “We’re client-centric,” in a creds deck, you know, when you’re trying to pitch new business, and “We really care about our clients.”

[00:09:26] Olivia Brooks Allan: And then you sit down and you have a tea or a glass of wine with someone, and you’re like, “So what do you do to be client-centric?” Pause. “Oh, well, we love our clients, and once a year we do a client event, and it’s a really great client event.” That’s great. So that’s marketing. Marketing is not being client-centric.

[00:09:45] Olivia Brooks Allan: Client-centric, and what we talk about a lot as a team inside of Nteractive, is that client-centric means understanding. And so all of our amazing associates inside of Interactive, as well as our freelance associates, because we’re an agency, we rely so heavily on this amazing team of freelancers.

[00:10:13] Olivia Brooks Allan: We spend a lot of time thinking about how to make our clients successful. So every single one of our associates has a client somewhere within our partnership.

[00:10:24] Olivia Brooks Allan: And so we think a lot about what’s happening in the stock market, and therefore, if they’re publicly traded, what’s happening with their stock price. We make an active, concerted effort to listen to publicly traded companies, and if they’re doing public earnings calls, listen to every single one.

[00:10:48] Olivia Brooks Allan: You’ll see our account directors send around a report, “Just listened to the earnings call. This is what we’re hearing. We may want to consider bringing up this element, this geopolitical element, or this potential close in our next conversation with them. They’ve mentioned they’ve closed this office.”

[00:11:06] Olivia Brooks Allan: “Is that an impact? Do they need our help? Do they need a huge town hall to really connect that messaging?” So client-centric is also, for us, again, playing this out of what this would look like on a day-to-day basis.

[00:11:22] Olivia Brooks Allan: Client-centric is we should wake up every morning knowing our clients’ calendars almost as well as they do, and sort of questioning ourselves, “What data points could I give to my client this morning that could help them be even more successful inside of their companies?”

[00:11:18] Olivia Brooks Allan: I say to our team a lot, “Who are we getting promoted this year? Do you know what their goals are, what they’re being measured against? Let’s figure out how to make sure that they accelerate and exceed those.” If we’re aligned with our clients’ goals, well, those goals roll up into the top line.

[00:11:33] Olivia Brooks Allan: Their C-suite team has cascaded those goals down to them, and so we’re in this symbiotic relationship, making sure that we’re very clear on how to make them successful. And then there are simple things. Client-centric is also doing things that aren’t part of the big picture I’m talking about now.

[00:11:49] Olivia Brooks Allan: Client-centric is, “Hey, I just heard this client got married. Let’s do a really nice E-card from all of us that just says, ‘We’re so excited for you.'” And you would not believe the smallest touches, and this is probably my five-star background, but it doesn’t always have to be this huge act of seeing you.

[00:12:07] Olivia Brooks Allan: Sometimes it can be something quite simple that you don’t expect, and so we try and find those little moments to make a client feel really special throughout the day, the week, and we challenge ourselves actively in doing that.

[00:12:21] Steve MacDonald: So much I love about all that. So much, I don’t even know where to ask the next question, but I feel like if I were a client of yours, I’d be seen.

[00:12:31] Steve MacDonald: I’m the opposite of a number. I’m the opposite of part of a report that you go over internally and look at, is this client going to churn? What can we do? Oh my gosh, the contract’s coming to an end. We better start to really understand what it is, how to make them, you know… So how do you do that?

[00:12:54] Steve MacDonald: How do you create a culture that transcends beyond you and your passion, right? Because you talk about it very eloquently, and you’ve already, a number of times, brought up the importance of the team, right? The talent inside of your company, because it can’t be just you. It has to start from the top, right? I mean, there’s got to be a vision, there’s got to be a culture, there’s got to be a mindset, and you clearly articulated that. How does the team do now? How do you get a team to adopt that and actually deliver on it?

[00:13:31] Olivia Brooks Allan: Yeah. So one framing that I would perhaps slightly change, in the way we think, you said, is helping clients be seen. We take it a step further by helping our clients feel safe. So we are very aware that we’re all waking up every morning to hopeless news and macroeconomic factors beyond our control.

[00:13:57] Olivia Brooks Allan: And so we believe that we want our people to feel safe in working with us, that they can bring their full selves to Nteractive. We want our clients to feel that we’re protecting them. We’re protecting them from news that they can’t handle, or not that they can’t handle it, but that they weren’t aware of.

[00:14:16] Olivia Brooks Allan: If we know that there’s a big impact, for example, to a conference that maybe is happening in an area that might have some unrest, we may proactively say, “Hey, we’ve gone ahead and proactively looked at our budgets for you and made some recommendations of where your attendance should go. Here’s where we can save in the budget.”

[00:14:36] Olivia Brooks Allan: So to the people, how do we do that, not just from an Olivia perspective, but from a full agency perspective? A couple of the things that we did last year, and this is throughout the industry, we have projects that come in. Sometimes they come in faster than you are necessarily ready for them.

[00:14:56] Olivia Brooks Allan: And as an agency, we took a real commitment about, I guess, a year ago to build out what we call the Nteractive Academy. The academy is a place where we have built modules of learning where our associates can come on board and immediately start to understand nuances of how a client thinks, words to use in meetings, how they like to have call reports delivered post-conversation, if they always want a pre-read, and the nuances, because every company that we work with has different cultures.

[00:15:38] Olivia Brooks Allan: And so the academy is a place where any of our associates can go, and if they’ve just joined and they’ll be semi-dedicated or dedicated to this account, their leader works with them to make sure that they’re assigned the right academy curriculum to get them off to the races before… And then we start more training.

[00:16:00] Olivia Brooks Allan: We also do a ton of exposure, and I’ll still lead a lot of client meetings to help teams see it’s okay to apologize. This happened on Monday. I was leading a client call, and I said, “You know what? We didn’t get that data right. Let me pause here and we’ll put it into the notes.”

[00:16:17] Olivia Brooks Allan: “We’re going to come back to you in 24 hours.” Taking accountability is a huge word for us, right? That it is okay to take accountability. And my peers, both on the senior leadership team that all report up into our CEO, all the way through our wider management team, we are really empowered to say, “I didn’t get that right. Let me go fix that.”

[00:16:39] Olivia Brooks Allan: Go back to the word safety. I feel so much safer if I know that I’m working with a team that operates with integrity, operates knowing that if they do say to a client, “Hey, I messed up here. This didn’t work,” there will not be repercussions. There is an absolute confidence in our people to say, “Go back, fix it, put it in the call notes.”

[00:17:01] Olivia Brooks Allan: We use Microsoft Co-Pilot for everything to capture notes through AI. It makes our teams work much faster. But to your point, not one person can do this. You have to make sure that your entire company is living and breathing and understands the ethos. Our core values are very much driven by integrity-bound accountability and kindness.

[00:17:27] Olivia Brooks Allan: I think that we tend to be very kind to one another, and we have a good laugh too. And I’ve never worked with a more supportive group of people in terms of feeling like I can bring my whole self to a role.

[00:17:38] Steve MacDonald: You know, again, wow. So much great. There was a term thrown out on a podcast I recorded about a year ago, and the woman talked about creating psychological safety amongst her team.

[00:17:52] Steve MacDonald: That they could just show up, they could try as hard as they wanted, but they could fail and it was okay, and it was acceptable, it was expected. It was about trying new and different things, and they could voice their opinions without feeling like they were going to be reprimanded for not saying something smart enough, right?

[00:18:14] Steve MacDonald: That there was just safety to show up and for everybody to try to do what you just described. Is that a good takeaway from what you’re saying, or…?

[00:18:25] Olivia Brooks Allan: I absolutely agree with that. I would say, going back to how does a company get built, and going back to our co-founders, they really have always allowed space for there not to be repercussions for doing your very best and showing up with your best self, and we have a lot of mistakes that happen.

[00:18:47] Olivia Brooks Allan: We work in a very dynamic environment. What we do is live. It is constantly changing. There are the pressures of the inevitable things that we can’t control in so much of what we do. I will say, though, that we are a company that one of our co-founders says, “Did they show you the homework?”

[00:19:09] Olivia Brooks Allan: And it took me a minute when I first joined here because I didn’t know what to do with that information. But what that means for us now, it’s very contextualized. How great is it if you’re working in a company and someone goes away, and to this other podcast person that was interviewing on psychological safety, and this psychological safety to say, “I’m going to go experiment.”

[00:19:31] Olivia Brooks Allan: “I may not do this spreadsheet correctly. I may not do this pitch deck correctly, but my leader is giving me the space to go figure it out and play and come back and show the homework.” The homework is important because it shows how they think. It gives you a place, a starting-off point for coaching and for feedback.

[00:19:52] Olivia Brooks Allan: We are incredibly proud of being able to say, “Huh, I wouldn’t have thought about it that way. I really like that. I would tweak it and think about it in this way.” And we actively ask for that. My management team, we just went through, as many management teams did months back, our annual goals.

[00:20:13] Olivia Brooks Allan: And I’m sure people have been through the goal planning process before, and they go into a goal planning tool, they sit there, but your peers never get to see it. My peers do very different things. So my management team is made up of the creative studio, the digital services team, the strategy team, the client services team.

[00:20:30] Olivia Brooks Allan: They have very different functions inside the agency. We spent a ton of time as a team listening to one another, listening to what one another was going to accomplish this year, understanding where the dependencies were, why I can’t do mine without you, and then also saying, “Redundant. You only need two goals because I’m already working on that one.”

[00:20:52] Olivia Brooks Allan: “Why don’t you come over and this will be a shared goal over here?” So we try and spend a lot of time really aligning as a team, but giving space. I’ll open almost every call with, “Hey guys, let’s make sure that this is a space where it’s safe. Let’s make sure that we are talking and giving active feedback to one another.”

[00:21:10] Olivia Brooks Allan: And I will tend to try and go first and say, “Okay, hit me with it, active feedback.” And I might even, on the side, ask one of my leaders, “Hey, just don’t hold back on me,” right? So I want the team to actively see that you’re really challenging me in a couple areas.

[00:21:23] Olivia Brooks Allan: I think it’s really important that people see that it’s okay that I can learn and grow. Again, that growth mindset piece is absolutely one of the pillars in how we try and show up as team members.

[00:21:36] Steve MacDonald: So you just used the word safety again in how you run these internal meetings, and I wrote it down, and I decided when you said it, it was like, this is going to be my main takeaway, and I don’t even know the rest of what she’s going to say, right?

[00:21:49] Steve MacDonald: But you talked about creating safety with your clients. You just talked about creating internal safety, and it seems to me that your title doesn’t really say what you do. It’s client-facing, right?

[00:22:07] Olivia Brooks Allan: We’re going to have to talk to the HR team about re-changing it. Yeah.

[00:22:13] Steve MacDonald: Because what you just talked about is an incredibly important part of creating client-centric safety.

[00:22:22] Steve MacDonald: You have to first create internal safety centricity. You can’t have one without the predecessor. And so that’s just one top-of-mind takeaway there. But what I loved about the word safety is it had such an emotional meaning, where Chief Client Officer had a very factual meaning to me, and it said a lot, right?

[00:22:46] Steve MacDonald: Because there aren’t a lot of B2B companies that have Chief Client Officers, right? That’s a very B2C thing. So just the fact that you’re inside of a B2B agency that has a Chief Client Officer says something about the company to begin with, I think. But there are many, many studies that show the importance of B2B purchasing decisions being more emotional than rational.

[00:23:13] Steve MacDonald: And so that’s the question ever since you brought up the word client safety that I said, was that intentional in terms of how the buyer decides, how you treat them, how they feel when they interact with you, the relationship, the way that you build trust? Is that intentional when you use the word safety? Because so much of the relationship, the decision-making, the decision to stay with you as a customer, is that intentional?

[00:23:44] Olivia Brooks Allan: Thank you, Steven, because I really love the way that you’re framing this, and this is what’s so great about conversations, is that I don’t know that I would’ve naturally drawn that out on my own.

[00:23:54] Olivia Brooks Allan: And so thank you for giving the space to say, “I’m reflecting on this, and I’m hearing something that I think sounds like it’s landing.” And anyone can be seen. So you can walk past any human being and see them. It is probably a hallmark of how I think, and this isn’t necessarily that I don’t go around hugging everybody, but how different does it feel if someone actually stops and talks to you?

[00:24:19] Olivia Brooks Allan: Says, “We’ve all been lost in New York City before, and there’s that occasional person that says, ‘Can I help you? You look lost.’” That makes you feel safe. And so I would say that we, as a culture, and my colleagues, as I’ve watched how they interact with their people, you see leaders sometimes that say, “Oh, I know.”

[00:24:44] Olivia Brooks Allan: You’re, you know, you have one of your direct reports, and they’re just so swamped, busy, cannot manage. You know, they’re just at that breaking point, and it happens. It happens in all businesses where an individual can feel just overwhelmed. And the leader that says, “Just let me know how I can support you,” versus the leader that puts 20 minutes to say, “Talk me through your day, and I’m going to help take two to three things off. We’re going to invest the 20 minutes, even though you say you don’t have even 20 minutes to breathe. I’m going to take 20 minutes, and we are going to remove things from your day, and we’re going to put that work somewhere else that’s safe.” You’re not saying something to make yourself feel good as a leader.

[00:25:31] Olivia Brooks Allan: “I’m such a good leader. I keep checking in, and I say, ‘How can I support you?'” You’re actually taking action on how to help them. I had the head of our creative studio come to me last week. She said, “You know, we’re going into huge production mode. Here’s what’s happening.

[00:25:46] Olivia Brooks Allan: Here’s what I need help with. Here’s a role that I think is really functioning well within the business.” And I said, “Give me 24 hours.” Built the business case, came back to her within 24 hours and said, “We have hiring approval, business case together to hire this additional role, which you said was going to take, you know, help alleviate some pressure points.”

[00:26:06] Olivia Brooks Allan: So it’s, you can say the right things. What’s more important is doing the right things, and that is where the safety piece comes in. And that’s the same philosophy with clients. If we say we’re going to do something, we do it, and then we take accountability if we miss a deadline or fall short. We take absolute accountability.

[00:26:27] Steve MacDonald: Here’s what I loved. 95%, making up that number, of this conversation is about how to align internally. How do we support our team internally, right? We are the engine. If PE-backed and VC-backed companies put money into the team first, and the idea second, right?

[00:26:50] Steve MacDonald: So important, you know, just kind of from a financial perspective. And I remember now, you brought this up, like learning that I had lost, it had decayed. It was a four-time PE-backed CEO. The guy would take companies, build them, and then sell them. The PE company would say, “We’re going to put you over here.”

[00:27:08] Steve MacDonald: He would build it, they would sell it. He did it four different times. And I said, “What’s the key to success?” And he said, “The executives in the company, and then the people that report to them.” He says, “But they need to know that I have their back. That’s the key to success.” It wasn’t about building businesses or aligning resources; it was just something simple like that.

[00:27:35] Olivia Brooks Allan: Yeah. Human beings are exceptional, and what’s so wonderful to see right now is that the talented people who work for us, both full-time and freelancers, are the ones who are really, really thriving right now, and they’re the ones who are finding ways to use tools to their advantage. So, you know, when it comes to implementing AI, we have an AI solutions leader here at our agency.

[00:28:04] Olivia Brooks Allan: And those that are saying, “I’m going to continue to make space to keep elevating myself and elevating my people,” that’s where there’s been just a real, it’s been beautiful to watch. The news loves to talk about AI and replacing jobs, and I have just seen the opposite.

[00:28:24] Olivia Brooks Allan: I think that it is an amazing tool for companies to embrace. In the same way, though, I’m not over-indexing on it. It’s the same moment when, you know, for us, Outlook came into our business, and we all started using that. It’s the people who understand that with tools, you can keep accelerating how you interact with your people and ideally give yourself more time to interact with your clients, understand their biggest challenges.

[00:28:54] Olivia Brooks Allan: And I don’t love the word busy. I try and really reframe the team and say, “Was your day productive?” Because if I keep hearing that the day was busy, we might be avoiding, for whatever reason, and I try to dive into that, that team member might be avoiding harder work. And so I want to understand, do they not know how to do the harder work, and we need training and development?

[00:29:19] Olivia Brooks Allan: Is it just not a natural skill set, and we want to find a different place for them within the agency? So really listening to your people and language matters. I’m a rhetoric and communication major in college, so I am very respectful of the way people speak and the words they use.

[00:29:41] Olivia Brooks Allan: And so if I get on a one-on-one and someone says, “Oh, I’ve just been so busy,” okay, let’s break that down because I would love to hear like, “It’s been a tough week. I had some really tough client calls, had to get through some thick stuff, and faced some hiring challenges. The person that we wanted to come took another offer, but it was productive, Liv.”

[00:30:00] Olivia Brooks Allan: That’s where we strive to be as an agency, and giving our teams the right tools, technologies, partnerships, we rely heavily on partnerships, is something that we think about a lot so that we can change from going to being busy, which sometimes is an excuse that they don’t want to go and do the stuff that maybe they’re less confident in doing, into, “It’s been a thick week, but it’s been productive, and I look back, and I’m really proud of these three things that we got done as a team and as a company.”

[00:30:31] Steve MacDonald: I want to go another two hours. I do, but we can’t. So here’s what I’d love to do. If you could boil down from everything that we’ve talked about here, or maybe something we haven’t talked about yet, but if there was one takeaway that you wanted CEOs, CROs, CMOs, CGOs to take away that are going to be consuming this conversation, the one thing that you wanted them to take away from our discussion today, what would it be?

[00:31:04] Olivia Brooks Allan: I would say that it is really important to keep in mind that preparation is respect. A lot of our conversation today has been about keeping our people safe. That takes preparation. How you show up for clients takes preparation. How you craft an email that shows you’ve actually taken time to think about the words you want to share is preparation.

[00:31:36] Olivia Brooks Allan: If you are not as good at a skill set as you know you need to be, a more effective leader, you should go prepare. You should find a mentor, a course, a class, or a book that will help you get better. That is preparation, and to me, it is something I do and tell our team on a daily basis: preparation is respect.

[00:31:58] Olivia Brooks Allan: And if you have a mindset that I’ll just wing it, I’m so good, I’ve done this a million times before, the client will see through that. That is not being client-centric. That is being someone that has given up on being client-centric. Being client-centric is putting in that work, always preparing for the turns that the client may not see.

[00:32:20] Olivia Brooks Allan: If you have anything from a quarterly business review to a weekly standing meeting with a client, if it’s a weekly standing meeting, that 15 minutes of preparation is respect. And I think it’s important in a world where we can move very fast, where you can write really darn good emails with some phenomenal AI tools, I would encourage executive leaders to teach their teams, then also check how they’re showing up, and make sure they are preparing.

[00:32:53] Steve MacDonald: You just changed my main takeaway. It’s not customer safety anymore. Its preparation is respect. I have both of them. I’m taking too many takeaways away from this. Such a phenomenal conversation. Thank you so much. You know, the goal of this podcast is to bring different C-suite executives from people all over the world.

[00:33:14] Steve MacDonald: We all have different backgrounds. We do not all have your experience. You don’t have mine, you know, so on and so on. And if we can bring all that together and share what we’ve learned, share what we’ve learned, how to be successful, that’s an amazing opportunity to be the rising tide that lifts all boats.

[00:33:32] Steve MacDonald: And you were a tsunami lifting all those boats today. I loved this conversation. I just want to say thank you for coming on the podcast.

[00:33:39] Olivia Brooks Allan: Yeah. Well, again, congratulations on the 300th episode, and I hope that we can keep conversing and rising tides together with you and all of the followers that are listening to you.